ring-a-ding-ding!

The wholesome rebel

Alexandra Oliver got a private school education, then became a slam poetry star. So, as you can imagine, her new book is both sweet and edgy



The Vancouver Province

Sunday, May 6, 2007

By David Spaner

Whimsy with an edge?

Vancouver poet Alexandra Oliver is proof that the street-smart and the light-hearted are not incompatible, that were Doris Day and Courtney Love to meet they might just become best friends for life.

Case in point: Oliver's new book of poetry, Where the English Housewife Shines. The poems may be written in by-now-unconventional conventional light verse, with old-style rhyme, and they often begin innocuously enough, but suddenly turn tough.

"Whimsy is ultimately very subversive," says Oliver. "You draw people in and there's some undertone that lingers and haunts people."

Oliver, who now lives in Seattle, will have a Vancouver homecoming May 11 when her book is launched here.

Befitting someone who mixed her teenage goth years with a Crofton House private-school education, Oliver proclaims in her poem "Ring-a-Ding-Ding," "I grew into a dame who loved the shame of loaded guns and cheap affairs" and "I've learned that her body is a temple and mine's a drive-in movie." In "How To Be a Team Player," Oliver assails the concept of corporate loyalty: "When the concept of The Team falls into the hands of some big cheese, You may be fighting at full steam an outbreak of an incurable disease . . . I love the other guy, Who gives it as much as I, As cook or lawyer, nurse or spy, But I can choose my own team, Thank you."

The edge is no surprise from one who was among the groundbreakers in Vancouver's slam poetry movement, now one of the most vital slams anywhere. When Oliver became involved in the mid-1990s, the concept of poets going head-to-head in thoroughly entertaining reading competitions was new to Vancouver.

As the slam movement took hold in 1995, Oliver had just returned to Vancouver, having received an MA in theatre at the University of Toronto and abandoned her acting aspirations. "I had a sense it would bring out the worst in me. It's fun and it's liberating, and you get a great rush from it, but I didn't like worrying about the way I looked at the time. Casting. It wasn't me at all."

Poetry, though, had a distinct appeal and she quickly became involved in the slam scene. Oliver performed everywhere from Lollapalooza to a CBC poetry faceoff, and in 1996 was named to Vancouver's first slam team.

"I was suspicious of it when I first heard of it. I was very idealistic and I thought: 'Competitive poetry? It sounds like figure skating.' But it was great. It motivated you. It got people interested in poetry who wouldn't be interested in poetry. And it was fun. The atmosphere was very intoxicated. We were in our twenties and this was really exciting stuff."

Oliver no longer performs at slams. "I enjoy performing but I wanted to work on stuff that could be read and enjoyed on the page as well, instead of pandering to audience reaction. But I still really enjoy going to them."

RC Weslowski, who will be performing with Oliver at her book launch, is a mainstay of the current scene. "It's neat that Alexandra has sort of progressed beyond the poetry slam world," he says. "Her poetry is very smart and very funny. There's a good dry wit to it."

Weslowski, an organizer of the Vancouver Poetry Slam (the first, third and fifth Monday of every month at Cafe Deux Soleils, 2096 Commercial Dr.), notes it's "a strong and vibrant scene within the North American slam scene. There is an immediacy of it, of somebody getting up on stage. It's not like watching TV. There's something human happening and it's live, for all its faults and beauties."

Moving to Seattle in 2005 provided new writing incentives for Oliver. Recently married, she had a child and her Serbian-immigrant husband was offered a job designing ships.

"I felt like I was removed from the loop," Oliver says. "When you have a child, you become more of an observer. Everything slows down. I began to take everything in: the way couples interact, the way mothers interact with their kids. So all of a sudden I became this receptive device."

She started writing and became involved in the Seattle poetry scene. And she sent her new work, combined with some vintage Oliver, to her old Vancouver friend Justine Brown, now operating Tin Press, a publishing house in London, England. The book Brown has published has the look of a 19th-century pamphlet, including Oliver's own drawings. "I wanted it to have that kind of charm, that slightly off-kilter elegance that things like Punch had."

No surprise that in Where the English Housewife Shines this one-time actor addresses popular culture in such poems as "Terence Stamp." There are local references to everything from West Vancouver to Port Coquitlam, with topics stretching from family ties ("The Tie") to sexual fantasies ("Phone Sex") to her new hometown ("Pioneer Square"). And she defines that Seattle square with references to her old hometown. "Pioneer Square is like if you were to take Robson Street and Pigeon Park and mash them together," she tells me.

"Pioneer Square" vividly creates images of "gold-digging wenches" and boy scouts "handing out favours on benches," adding: "Beware, because misfortune never sleeps." But, like Oliver is wont to do, it ends in whimsy: "Take the family there."

It's the culture clash -- the alternative meets the wholesome -- that helps make Oliver intriguing.

"I'm essentially a very formal person," she says. "It's just the way I am. I grew up with a certain propriety and it is un-erasable."

--

Alexandra Oliver's launch: Friday at 6 p.m. at Forufera Centre, mezzanine level, 505 Hamilton St. The Vancouver Poetry Slam team finals are tomorrow at 9 p.m. at Wise Hall, 1882 Adanac St.

Two poems by Alexandra Oliver:

The Smell of Trouble (2001)

The envelopes of powder keep on coming,
Snowing rashes in assistants' hands;
US rations rain Islamic lands;
CNN hails, “Falling sky!” and bumming
Out the ordinary Joes and Janes
Who swear off letters and domestic planes.

The newsprint whispers horror, gently stains
The digits of the housewives. Little wonder
Markets fold and bearishly go under,
Crunching under slow commuter trains,
Whining, like an orphan, on their wheels,
In the hour of work and morning meals.

This is how a normal person feels,
Tilts their nose to scents of eastern trouble.
A land of rock is bombed to dust and rubble
In the wake of army issue heels.
We lose the scent at night. Returning cars
Trail out beneath dissolving seams of stars.

One of These Days (2007)

We wander to the park. The mothers clump
Barnacular against the little wall,
That thing is loneliness, the blackened hump
Each one of us attempted. It is all
So neatly knitted: waking, messy meals,
The robust pong of diaper and the squirms
Of legs resisting stroller straps. It feels
So odd to covet friendship on those terms.
The sweat suits shuffle, hands scratch digits down
On cards and old receipts. Oh God, who calls
To talk about the pram, the birthday clown,
The infant gyms in vast, suburban malls?
I focus on my son, take on that glaze.
When will you call? Oh soon—one of these days.